AMD reportedly hosted an event designed to showcase its upcoming Polaris GPUs and the Radeon Pro Duo to journalists behind closed doors in Taiwan recently, ahead of an expected official unveiling in May. The big noise coming out of the event is that the switch to the 14nm FinFET fabrication process means the Polaris 10 GPU performs extremely close to the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, but for a drastically cheaper price point.

As we’ve detailed before, the process shrink means improvements to efficiency and transistor density, resulting in a bump in performance. That bump looks to be a hefty one as well, if the Polaris 10 is to match the GTX 980 Ti.

The Polaris 10 GPU is the successor to the 300-series, which AMD views as its mainstream range. This means Polaris 10 is not the next Fury and Fury X, but rather a 300 series successor, which is up to and including the R9 390X. That equates to the eventual Polaris 10 powered Radeon R9 490X being capable of GTX 980 Ti performance for a price tag in the region of $300-400.

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The Polaris 10 GPU itself has a maximum TDP of 175W, but AMD claims it will generally consume far less than that. Early benchmarks have the Polaris 10 scoring in the region of 4000 points in 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra, which puts it firmly in the ballpark of the Fury X and the 980 Ti. If AMD can hit the rumoured $300 price point with such a graphics card then it could have an absolute monster on its hands.

Should these performance benchmarks ring true, will it be upgrade time for you when Polaris rolls around? Or are you waiting to see what the next-gen Vega GPUs have in store?

maximum TDP of 175W means that the GPU can operate at a maximum of 175W with overclock, that's how AMD rates their products, in reallity it will consume less than 175W as AMD themselves even said. For example my CPU is a 95W TDP cpu, but on full load with P95 it consumes 66W.

If this is true then it would not be worth my money to upgrade to a polaris GPU, I want at the very least the equivalent of a Titan Z in my next upgrade, the 980 Ti comes close but doesn't quite cut it. If a GPU is gonna be worth the upgrade in my book it must be at least 100% more powerful than what I have now and cost no more than $300.

For comparison: the 980 Ti is only 86% more powerful than my current GPU, while the Titan Z is 127% faster. Assuming both cards had identical prices (which they don't) it would make more sense (cont.)

was thinking the same its great and all but tbh i dont want near 980ti performance id want better than . . . maybe if i still had my gtx760 or r9 280 id go for this but coming from a 390x i dont really feel the need as strong especially since im still at 1080p and dont plan to change that any time soon

Well you do kind of have to optimize your spending based on your budget and buy only hardware upgrades that make sense based on a number of factors. Namely the performance difference from one's own hardware and the price.

I follow my own strict price to performance ratio rule when determining what would be a worthy upgrade to my system. it varies from hardware to hardware and I'm still in the process of making the determination for processors.

Is it now? I think it's decent at best. Could be better. I feel like I made a number of mistakes with recent upgrades.

As of right now my rules/guidelines does not put virtual reality into consideration and will not for some time. While I am super interested in VR myself (Please don't ask me why I suddenly changed my mind) its not really worth considering at the time due to the limitations of the technology. Modern VR is still very much in its youth.

That said I most likely won't even consider making a VR edition of the guidelines before 2020.

But we will just have to see how things go from here. It is not currently set in stone. As it is my current personal guidelines for buying hardware guidelines assume a resolution of 1920x1080. I may upgrade the guidelines to assume 1440P later this year.

i have abit of a soft spot for your cpu, used to have one paired with a gtx 760. loved it :) and think the 380 is a really nice card :) you have a good combo. . . felt the same about 4k building this pc wanted to much "bling" so in the end went with 1080p for the hardware, at the time i could have swapped my board for

. . . a 5820k setup but i needed 2 tvs and then id need a better gpu for the 4k one and stuff so stuck with 2 at 1080p and love the 4790k anyway its better than anything iv ever had and still got 2 good drives and a nice case and stuff so happy in the end

Yes, 4K is very expensive to build a rig for at this time as it is literally 4x the size of 1080p. (twice the height, twice the width = 4x) so you'd need literally 4x graphics the power for 4K. That said, at this point in time with current technology unless you are wealthy it's simply not worth it.

no harm in talking like a pro lol :D // think youre right loukas and il look really closely at vega next year, another thing iv wanted is a nice card to crossfire in the future ever since i switched to amd so think vega suits that better than polaris aswell

you are a genius. i have been complaining about this. we pc gamers get so excited over minor performnace gains across generations. for a true nextgen tech we should be expecting close to 90% jump in real world game performance.not d 30%

Not really, it has taken me quite a few years of trial and error to figure out the optimal price to performance ratio for graphics cards. I intend to knock out processors next. Also if a GPU is 100% better in performance then it means the GPU is twice as powerful.

we had like what 4years 28nm for every die shrink power effectiveness was cut down pretty well and of course there was also performance gain so it was wise to wait if you just got that gpu that is of course my opninon afterall someone would prefer performance from today… however dont wory 980ti is beast of gpu it will last you long on 1080p hope nvidia doesnt screw 2much perfomance gtx 9xx serie